This collection examines the perennial tension between society's need to protect its citizens from crime, while assuring that the crime control and reduction measures that it enacts do not deny basic rights or exacerbate the socioeconomic inequality that gives rise to disparate rates of offending. Focusing largely on developments in criminal justice policies and practices enacted during the last few decades, the essays in this volume explore the delicate balance between governmental crime control efforts and professed goals of promoting social justice and protecting civil liberties.

The purpose of American Penology is to provide a story of punishment's past, present, and likely future. The story begins in the 1600s, in the setting of colonial America, and ends in the present. As the story evolves through various historical and contemporary settings, America's efforts to understand and control crime unfold. The context, ideas, practices, and consequences of various reforms in the ways crime is punished are described and examined. Though the book's broader scope and purpose can be distinguished from prior efforts, it necessarily incorporates many contributions from this rich literature. While this enlarged second edition incorporates select descriptions and contingencies in relation to particular eras and punishment ideas and practices, it does not limit itself to individual "histories" of these eras. Instead, it uses history to frame and help explain particular punishment ideas and practices in relation to the period and context from which they evolved. The authors focus upon selected demographic, economic, political, religious, and intellectual contingencies that are associated with historical and contemporary eras to show how these contingencies shaped America's punishment ideals and practices. In offering a new understanding of received notions of crime control in this edition, Blomberg and Lucken not only provide insights into the future of punishment, but also show how the larger culture of control extends beyond the field of criminology to have an impact on declining levels of democracy, freedom, and privacy.

The concept of critical criminology – that crime and the present day processes of criminalization are rooted in the core structures of society – is of more relevance today than it has been at any other time. Written by an internationally renowned scholar, Contemporary Critical Criminology introduces the most up-to-date empirical, theoretical, and political contributions made by critical criminologists around the world. In its exploration of this material, the book also challenges the erroneous but widely held notion that the critical criminological project is restricted to mechanically applying theories to substantive topics, or to simple calling for radical political, economic, cultural, and social transformations. This book is an essential source of reference for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Criminology, Criminal Theory, Social Policy, Research Methodology, and Penology.

Thirteen contributions from international academics, many of whom were born and grew up in China, discuss recent research in crime and social control in China. They consider some of the reasons for the increase in economic crimes and corruption in recent decades as China's economy has been in transi

Dangerous Politics: Risk, Political Vulnerability, and Penal Policy brings together relevant literature in law, criminology, and politics to provide insights into the nature of British penal politics, the role of the judiciary and pressure groups, and the interrelation between risk, the 'public voice', and penal politics. It presents a detailed case study of the IPP story: the creation and eventual demise of the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence. Drawing on over 60 in-depth interviews with key policymakers, the author investigates the beliefs, traditions, and political processes that propelled developments in the 'IPP story', namely the creation, contestation, amendment, and demise of the IPP sentence. An indeterminate sentence modelled upon the existing life sentence but targeted far more broadly, the IPP sentence has been described as 'one of the least carefully planned and implemented pieces of legislation in the history of British sentencing' (Jacobson and Hough, 2010) and has dramatically increased the indeterminate-sentenced prison population, from approximately 3,000 in 1992 to over 13,000 in 2014. Though abolished in 2012, it remains a pressing issue: over 5,000 IPP prisoners remain, with ongoing campaigns pressing for their release. Standing as one of the most striking examples of the expansion of preventive goals in sentencing policy, this study of the IPP story stands as a cautionary tale, with important lessons for Australia, Canada, the United States, and other nations that continue to pursue preventive goals. This book argues that the IPP story demonstrates the need to be cautious of equating substance with process - while on one view the IPP sentence constitutes a penal manifestation of the risk society, its development refutes the 'evolutionary growth' of such policies as implied by the 'new penology' thesis. Dangerous Politics makes an original contribution to our understanding of the genesis and demise of the IPP sentence, and to our broader understanding of the nature of penalty in early 21st century Britain. It will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of criminology, criminal law, politics and policymaking, as well as sentencing and criminal justice policymakers.

This book, a contribution to general criminological theory, suggests that the key to why some societies have higher crime rates than others lies in the way different cultures go about the social process of shaming wrongdoers. Shaming can be counterproductive, making crime problems worse. But when shaming is done within a cultural context of respect for the offender, it can be extraordinarily powerful, efficient, and just form of social control.

This is the first single authored book to trace the emergence of Convict Criminology and explore its relevance beyond the USA to the UK and other parts of Europe. It presents uniquely reflexive scholarship combining personal experience with critical perspectives on contemporary penalogy, focussing explicitly on men.

What are the various forces influencing the role of the prison in late modern societies? What changes have there been in penality and use of the prison over the past 40 years that have led to the re-valorization of the prison? Using penal culture as a conceptual and theoretical vehicle, and Australia as a case study, this book analyses international developments in penality and imprisonment. Authored by some of Australia’s leading penal theorists, the book examines the historical and contemporary influences on the use of the prison, with analyses of colonialism, post colonialism, race, and what they term the ’penal/colonial complex,’ in the construction of imprisonment rates and on the development of the phenomenon of hyperincarceration. The authors develop penal culture as an explanatory framework for continuity, change and difference in prisons and the nature of contested penal expansionism. The influence of transformative concepts such as ’risk management’, ’the therapeutic prison’, and ’preventative detention’ are explored as aspects of penal culture. Processes of normalization, transmission and reproduction of penal culture are seen throughout the social realm. Comparative, contemporary and historical in its approach, the book provides a new analysis of penality in the 21st century.

In Vigilantism, Culberson argues for a clear-cut distinction between domestic terrorism, in which actions are taken that deny progression in the social order, and vigilantism, in which the actors are vigilant in all things social that could do harm to the progressive social order. Culberson maintains that vigilantism has been the motivating social force in American politics since the founding of the country. This readable volume examines the American peoples' history of taking the law into their own hands and analyses the use of this private power in three eras of American politics--Colonial, Populist, and Progressive--asserting that private power effected the transitions in creating, distributing, and maintaining socially acceptable values and norms.